Good news!

All the best things happen while I'maway, I'm convinced of it... There's a conspiracy there somewhere!

I rang home yesterday and Michael told me that not only has our mortgage been approved (phew!) but our solar rebate has also been approved. This means that we will get back 50% of the money we're paying out for our solar electricity system, and I can't tell you what a relief that is. For starters, we're intending to put the rebate straight back into our mortgage to reduce our monthly payments, so this is REALLY good news.

Mortgage madness or "pressure, what pressure?"

Two photographs from slightly different angles, showing you the strip footings of the main house with, at left, more or less of the concrete pad that will form the floor of the lounge/TV room! The roughly circular patches of grey in the photos are crusher dust, laid as a foundation for two 34,000 litre rainwater tanks that will sit behind the main house. They, combined with a tank off the office/studio roof and one off the shed at the bottom of the block, will give us over 100,000 litres of rainwater stored on site - hopefully plenty to cope with drought conditions and/or top up a swimming pool, if we can ever afford one. Plus there will be a header tank up the hill behind the house of 20,000 litres, for use by the Rural Fire Service in the event of a bush fire on the block.





























And two more photos showing the reinforcing that's going into the concrete pad for the office/studio building. Isn't that a great view? That's what Michael and I will see from our work spaces once it's all finished - what you can't see because it was hazy this morning is that there's a view of the ocean along the horizon. Fantastic!

Meanwhile, the mortgage... The second mortgage company has finally managed to get the correct valuer up to the block and complete a very satisfactory valuation. This now has to be sent to Head Office and approved, then there's paperwork to sign and Title Deeds to hand over. All this can - allegedly - be wrapped up before I go away in 10 days' time. Or at least, that's the plan.

It would be good if it all went well because today I got the sit-down-while-you-read-it invoice for the second stage payment: all $138,000.00 of it and unless we get that mortgage sorted out, I can't pay the invoice! (Warren, if you're reading this, don't worry...)

I'm doing something very unusual for me: I'm trusting that everything's going to be OK instead of worrying myself into an anxious frenzy. After watching what, 7?, series of Grand Designs I am inurred to the thought that building anything is an extremely stressful activity and I'm trying to ameliorate the rising levels of stress hormones by practicing calmness and my Zen 'beginner's mind' techniques. I'll let you know how I go.

While I'm meditating Warren is just getting on with the job. When I asked today how far he thought he'd have got by the time I get back he thought for a moment and then said that he reckoned he'd have got everything to lock-up by then. WOW! At this rate we could be in the house by my birthday, never mind Michael's.

Foundations

You can't have a house without foundations, can you? Well yesterday the piers were drilled down through the house pad onto the rock below, steel rods were inserted and the whole lot was concreted in place. At the front edge of the house the piers go 2.5m down in some places, which is one reason why the front of the house doesn't sit right on the front of the pad: it would be a very long way down to the rock! As it is, we've used 79m of concrete instead of the 43m we'd estimated, which puts us around $3,000 over budget - not the sort of news you want to hear right at the very start of the build, but it isn't exactly optional, is it?














I climbed up the benching at the back of the pad to take a look down onto the whole of the house pad to take this photo. You can see Michael talking to Warren, our builder, and Warren's colleague Josh who was cutting to size the wire cages for the strip footings that will rest on top of the piers. To the right of the photograph is the bedroom end of the house, and the larger rectangle to the left of Josh is the main living space plus pantry. Just out of the photograph to the left of the living space is the TV lounge, which will sit on a concrete slab (unlike the rest of the house): you can see the start of the wooden forms that will form a template for the slab when it's poured next week.



















It's strange seeing the ground peppered with the holes for the piers! Only a week ago it was plain earth and I took up some friends for a visit. Now things are really starting to happen...

Today we suffered slightly from a strange spatial mis-perception that afflicts owners when they go and see their house being built: suddenly everything seems really small. The bedroom end of the house seemed far too small to accommodate three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a walk-in wardrobe, and similarly the living end of the house seemed tiny and cramped. Warren assures us that this isn't so! I think our perceptions will shift around during different phases of the build. I know that I went to see a friend's extensive renovations and quailed at its miniscule size, and yet once it was painted and fitted out it seemed huge. Doubtless our minds will play the same tricks on us as the building goes up. Meanwhile I'm going to carry on feeling really excited about our house!

Mortgage woe... for the moment, anyway

Ahhh... it's apparently very hard to join up the dots and do things sensibly, at least this seems to be the case in financial offices around the country. Mortgage lender one says, "yes, yes, yes, yes, fab house, love the plans, we can lend you $xxxxx because we valued it at $yyyyyy, yes, yes, yes, just doing the paperwork, oh. We can't lend you anything because your block of land is more than 3 hectares. Bye!" Second mortgage lender (BTW, wholly owned by mortgage lender one) says, "Yes, yes, yes, yes, we'll send out a valuer.... {SILENCE - always worrying}... oh sorry, sent it to the wrong valuer who couldn't read the paperwork anyway, yeah, we'll let you know when we've sorted it all out."

Meanwhile, we've decided STUFF IT! And we've started the foundations. See next post for photos!

Auction fever

On Friday Michael and I went to the buyers' preview of some 'home maker's' items at auction near Coffs Harbour and came away with a list of a few things we might want to buy if we could. So this morning I nervously went to the auction - my first - and came away the proud owner of three brand spanking new toilets!

There were almost 200 bidding cards given out and the place was heaving. It seems to be a bit of an outing because people brought along their children, parents, friends, neighbours... lots of people milling around and surprisingly few of them actually bidding.

Once things got under way it went very fast. The auctioneer spoke so fast it was hard to understand and to keep on track with the lot numbers in the catalogue. And I didn't realise how it worked with the top two bidders: where there were multiple identical items the lead bidder won the right to decide how many of them they wanted and if any were left the second bidder got first option on the rest.

The shower cabinet, vanity unit and tiles we were after went for silly prices. The vanity unit went for more than it would have cost brand new! People definitely get carried away with the bidding process, and I can understand why; I didn't even bid on these items because the starting prices were high and the prices went up very quickly.

The toilets I was interested in were in the second lot sold; the first ones were 'sold up' up as being quite expensive and accordingly went for a higher price, but the lot of six toilets I was interested in wasn't highlighted in that way and I got three in the end for $377 each (a significant saving on the $549 each for the ones quoted by Warren's bathroom people). They're nothing special: white porcelain toilets with your standard behind-the-seat cistern. Nothing fancy, they're not wall-hung or with concealed cisterns or anything. But they have a 4* WELS rating and dual flush system which means they're very water-efficient (for a toilet), which is great. These three will hopefully grace our family bathroom, the separate 'powder room' as it's known over here, and the toilet in the studio. We'll get a matching toilet/bidet set for our en-suite but at least the other three will match.

So there you go. I understand why people get carried away: there's a 'buzz' that's to do with anticipation and anxiety and the thrill of 'beating' someone else for the prize. Winning the bid is easy: all you do is keep sticking up your bid card for the auctioneer to see, so that you bid more than the opposition. And it's so tempting when you see the one thing you'd have liked disappearing out of your reach! Being sensible requires planning and a bit of discipline. I could ill-afford the time to research the recommended retail prices of the auction items, but I looked stuff up on the web and came up with some figures. Then I calculated how much I would be prepared to pay, added the 11% buyers' premium charged by this auction house and evaluated the result and, if it seemed reasonable, that was my top price. All I have to do now is pay the balance (after leaving my deposit) and work out how we're going to transport them up to the shed on our block.

Five months later...

And we have a builder! I won't bore you with the entire saga of builder 3 and 4. Lovely people, both of them, but we just couldn't afford number 3, and number 4 could build us a house for the right price, just not the right house! If we'd been happy to do it all the way he wanted i.e. cornices and architraves and concrete floors on the inside, and rendered brick and a tiled roof on the outside we would have been fine. The trouble is that we don't want rendered brick walls, tiles on the roof and bloody fussy detailing around every skirting board, the ceiling and every door. No, no, NO!!!!

Then, amazingly, builder number 5 - Warren Macdonald - came charging in on his white horse to save us. Previously he's been the builder's builder, the one others referred to but said we wouldn't be able to get him because he was too busy working on a smart local development. In fact the owners of the smart local development had warned us off, saying Warren was theirs and not to be contacted except for general advice! But in the current financial situation it seems that people aren't buying into smart local developments and so Warren has less work on with them than anticipated, so although we'd only asked for his advice he offered to do a full costing. Et voila it came in at a price we can - just - afford.

The next hurdle is the bank... Once we've finalised things with Warren and come up with a contract we can go to our bank and ask if they'll lend us the money. If we're successful there is a chance we could be starting the build in June or perhaps July... which gives us an outside chance of being well and truly moved into the new house by this time next year.

Garden/ia

I remember buying Gardenias as fragile, temperamental, and as I seem to recall expensive pot plants in the UK. Well here they're large shrubs, small shrubs, prostrate ground cover shrubs, hedging or - as here - grown as standards! We bought this one not long after we arrived and it's taken us a while to work out how to look after it: lots of water, not too much wind (although it's been falling over in its pot regularly with all the wind), get rid of woolly aphids and scale insects as soon as you see them and water in lots of liquid seaweed fertiliser as soon as the leaves start to yellow... and so here it is, looking luscious and starting to flower again at the beginning of summer. Mmmmmmm what a gorgeous smell.